Infrastructure-as-a-Service is the fundamental building block of the cloud and according to Gartner, there seems to be a lot more growth potential for IaaS providers (growth of 47.8% through 2015).

A lot of people are familiar with Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Rackspace – which are the two major publicly-traded cloud providers, but it seems like more and more data centers, managed hosting providers, and telecom companies are expanding their cloud offerings to compete with them (Madison Technology is a good example). This is a good idea because everyone’s needs are unique and lock-in is bad. Getting locked-in to one cloud provider means you risk losing out during down-time, but even worse is that you lose the agility of your IT, which is the core tenet of the cloud in the first place.

ComputeNext, a company I recently became familiar with, has the foresight to prevent a cloud monopoly. The company is federating a cloud inventory, which in turn is enabling end-users to easily manage a multi-cloud environment. It’s a cloud marketplace that also enables those users to search and buy the right cloud computing for their needs.

ComputeNext is positing itself to be the Expedia of cloud computing, enabling choice in the cloud, so that users can search, discover, use cloud resources from many different providers instead of just deciding to go with AWS or Rackspace, which might not be the best fit for their application. So before you decide to launch your next overnight, million-dollar iPhone app – you should think about where you’re putting it (i.e. which Cloud)!

At the moment ComputeNext is in beta, and offering free computing resources for a limited time. Click here to learn more about ComputeNext, follow them on Twitter or watch this nifty video: